Winter Lights in Lyon

The taxi driver had been telling me for ten minutes that it never snowed in Lyon.

"Never," he said again, and flicked his wipers up a notch. "Two times in my life. Maybe three. This is not normal."

"It looks quite normal," I said. Outside the window the snow came down in fat, unhurried flakes, the kind you see on Christmas cards and in films where the heroine has excellent hair. Mine was in a clip. The clip was losing.

"It is a catastrophe," he said, with enormous satisfaction.

I had my phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, because Priya had called the minute I landed and Priya did not believe in hanging up just because the person she was talking to was in a moving vehicle in a foreign country during a catastrophe.

"Say it again," she said. "From the top."

"No. The driver will think I'm unwell."

"He doesn't speak English."

"He speaks English," the driver said.

"He speaks English," I told Priya.

"Then he can be your audience. Go on. 'Julian, thank you so much, I'm thrilled to accept.'"

I closed my eyes. "Julian, thank you so much. I'm thrilled to accept."

"Less thrilled. You sound like a game show. You're about to be the youngest Associate Director in the history of Aldridge Hale. Thrilled is for people who win a hamper."

"I'd love a hamper," I said, and the driver laughed.

The thing was, it was not a sure thing. Julian had said "on completion," and Julian chose his words the way other people chose wine, slowly and with a view to how they would look later. On completion meant go to Lyon, look at a tired old hotel on the river, write a report that tells the board it's worth what we're about to offer, get the owner to sign, come home. On completion meant the Delorme deal. It meant a title and a salary and a bonus, and the bonus meant a deposit, and the deposit meant my mum would stand in a kitchen that nobody could take off her.

Four steps. I liked a plan with four steps. Four steps, and you could see the end from the beginning.

"Where are you now?" Priya asked.

I looked out. We had come off the motorway into the city some time ago, and the city had turned out to be enormous and old and lit up like a jewelry box. There were strings of white lights across the streets and in the bare trees, and on a hill above everything a church glowed gold against the dark, so high and so pale it looked like it had been set down there from somewhere else.

"I have no idea," I said. "There's a church on a hill."

"Fourvière," said the driver. "The basilica. Everyone looks at it. Next week, the Fête, you will see. All the city, lights. Four nights. Millions of people." He waved his hand at the snow. "If they can come."

"There's a light festival on the eighth," I told Priya.

"Are you going?"

"I'm going home on the fifth."

"Claire."

"I'm going home on the fifth with a signed letter of intent," I said, "and then I am going to the Christmas party in a dress I have not yet bought, and Julian is going to make a speech, and I'm going to look tastefully surprised."

We crossed a bridge. Below us a river ran wide and dark and fast, black water with the lights shaking on it, and on the far side a long, low palace of a building stretched along the bank, all honey-colored stone and rows of lit windows, with a great dark dome in the middle of it and a little lantern on top like a hat on a very dignified head.

I forgot I was on the phone.

"That's the Hôtel-Dieu," the driver said. "Old hospital. Very old. Now it is shops, and a hotel for rich people." He shrugged. "Your hotel is on the other side. Looking at it."

"Looking at it," I repeated.

"From the other side," he said. "Like the poor cousin."